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Sync forces buffer flush

by
Wayne Maples
[Published on 20 April 2004 / Last Updated on 20 April 2004]

Mark Russinovich at www.sysinternals.com has released the freeware utility Sync which forces
NT, Windows 2000, and Win9x to flush buffers and save unsaved buffered data.
Useful to Windows NT admin.

UNIX provides a standard utility called sync,
which can be used to direct the operating system to flush all file system data
to disk in order to insure that it is stable and won't be lost in case of a
system failure. Otherwise, any modified data present in the cache would be lost.
Here is a an equivalent that I wrote, called Sync, that works on both Windows NT
and Windows 95/98. Use it whenever you want to know that modified file data is
safely stored on your hard drives. Unfortunately, Sync requires administrative
privileges to run. This version, 2.0, also lets you flush removable drives such
as ZIP drives. Source code to the NT-only version of Sync is available on the
Dr. Dobb's Journal Systems Internals CD-ROM

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